About a year or so before I started this course (Bloc), I realized I was not happy with the path my career was taking. I was on the hardware side of IT (server/network admin, pc repair, etc) for more than 10 years, but it just wasn’t something I enjoyed. I had always had an interest in learning programming, but never was sure where to start. So in about August or September of 2016 I decided I wanted to check it out and see if it was something I was interested in doing.

So I enrolled in a free class on Python at Coursera and went through several of the classes there. I found myself facinated with the code and the ability to create. I knew within a few weeks that I had pretty much wasted the last 10 years of my life and that this was what I wanted to be doing.

Now, at almost 32 years old, I knew I needed something drastic to be able to pivot my career and trying to take part-time classes to get a degree wouldn’t cut it. I am married with two children, however, so I still have to provide for them as well. So I started reading about programming boot camps, where in just a matter of a few months they turn you from no experience to a job-ready web developer. I realized that I couldn’t afford to quit my job and pay to go to an on-site boot camp, so when I started researching online options, I quickly found Bloc.

I did a lot of reaearch about the program and decided it was the best choice for me. So in December of 2016 I signed up for the program and opted to wait until late January to officially start the course so that I could prepare. I didn’t want to go into the program completely green, so I found some other free courses online for basic Javascript and Ruby and spent the next month cramming as much into my head as possible. Everything from HTML/CSS to basic command line usage to Git…. it was a tough few weeks, but I really feel like it paid off.